Xfce

Subdomains

xfce4-power-manager 1.6.1

After almost two years I finally managed to get around to release a new version of the power manager, including many bugfixes that have accumulated over this time over the original Gtk+3/GDBus port that is 1.6.0.

Users will mostly notice the improved support for Desktop systems (they used to have the “battery-missing” icon displayed in the panel plugin – a regression over 1.4.x, which handled desktops more gracefully). Those who also use xfce4-notifyd’s recent logging mechanism will notice that now not every power manager event (e.g. changing the brightness) ends up in the log, as many notifications are marked as transient.

xfce4-panel 4.12.2 and 4.13.2

Both the stable 4.12 series and the 4.13 development series saw releases of late.

4.12.2

4.12 saw a small feature release adding support for the much and often requested “primary monitor” feature of RandR. So when you now define a panel’s location as “Output: Primary” it will dynamically move to the monitor marked as “primary” through the xfce4-display-settings dialog.

The default value “Automatic” for the Output option remains, so users will not notice any invasive changes here. Also the behavior of this default option remains unchanged (usually pushing the panel to the left-most monitor – aka x=0/y=0 – by default).

4.13.2

4.13 also saw a release, introducing GObject Introspection support, which should enable people to write Panel plugins in different languages (e.g. Python). We still need a template for that (volunteers forward!) so people can get their hands dirty more easily, but I think this is a very nice addition.

Apart from this I fixed a lot of smaller and bigger issues in the panel’s core plugins (actions, clock, launcher, tasklist and systray) and the settings dialog can now again be plugged into the xfce4-settings-manager dialog.

After only 2 months of work I was today ready to release xfce4-notifyd 0.4.1 (thanks in part to Viktor’s fix for make distcheck) with a bunch of fixes and some small features too (and of course lots of translation updates).

New panel plugin menu layout

Features

The panel plugin that was introduced in 0.4.0 received some attention, gaining a new hidden option (log-icon-size) for users to set the icon-size for the notifications that are displayed in the menu. Furthermore I added a “Clear log” button and finally decided to revamp the layout of the menu a little, inspired by some work of the elementary folks. Now the “Do not disturb” item is on top (or bottom, depending on your panel layout) of the list for easy and quick/er access and sports a GtkSwitch because the GtkCheckMenuItem was not visible enough.
To top off the changes to the plugin I added a placeholder text in case the log has been cleared or there are no notifications to display (e.g. if the “only notifications from today” filter is set but the log only contains entries from yesterday and before).

Furthermore spent some more time on the notification window layout and it should be very consistent now, so equal spacing between the icon, subject, body, buttons and the edge of the bubble.

Finally I added a configure option to use autostart instead of dbus (Bug #13989), which is a feature some distros (like Mageia) have done already via downstream patches so far and which helps if people have multiple DEs and therefore notification services installed in parallel.

Bugfixes

Regarding bugfixes there are also a few notable mentions. With the help of several contributors the following issues were tackled:

Download

With each new release, the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin becomes more refined and better suited for Xfce users. The latest release adds support for the MPRIS Playlists specification and improves support for Spotify and other media players.

What’s New?

New Feature: MPRIS Playlists Support

The 5 most recently played playlists are displayed (if supported by the player). Admittedly, I have not found a player that seems to implement the ordering portion of this specification.

New Feature: Experimental libwnck Support

libwnck is a window management library. This feature adds the “Raise” method for media players that do not support it, allowing the user to display the application window after clicking the menu item in the plugin.

Spotify for Linux is the only media player that I have found which does not implement this method. Since this is the media player I use most of the time, this was an important issue for me to resolve.